The Neutrino Fast Flavor Instability in Three Dimensions

Understand

Neutrino flavor instabilities have the potential to shuffle neutrinos between electron, mu, and tau flavor states, modifying the core-collapse supernova mechanism and the heavy elements ejected from neutron star mergers.

• Analytic methods indicate the presence of so-called fast flavor transformation instabilities, and numerical simulations can be used to probe the nonlinear evolution of the neutrinos.
• Simulations of the fast flavor instability to date have been performed assuming imposed symmetries.
• We perform simulations of the fast flavor instability that include all three spatial dimensions and all relevant momentum dimensions in order to probe the validity of these approximations.